


Should I Stay or Should I Blow This Icicle Stand

by foxtrot77



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-typical language, F/F, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2019-04-05 15:36:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14047398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxtrot77/pseuds/foxtrot77
Summary: Ohio receives a distress call from Project Freelancer, who is sending a ship to their location.Sherry thinks this entire situation stinks, and she tries to convince Ohio not to go.Ohio doesn't listen.





	Should I Stay or Should I Blow This Icicle Stand

**Author's Note:**

> For the RvB Angst War!

Ohio stares at the red light on the radio. It blinks, stays lit for a few seconds, fizzes out. Blips back up for a millisecond, disappears. Soon, as the light stays on for longer and longer periods of time, Ohio can hear a voice.

“… _llo? Is… out there? Hello?”_

Ohio slams her thumb down on the talk button and leans in.

“Hello? Hello? This is Agent Ohio of Project Freelancer?” Heart racing, she lets go of the button.

She tries not to let the hope blossoming in her chest get too out of control, not daring to believe this is happening, that they might be getting out of here.

“… _ello? Can anyone here me? This is… of Project… ancer._ ”

“Idaho! Iowa!” Ohio calls over her shoulder.

The others are down the hall, but just in case they can’t hear her she pings them through their helmets. Seconds later the sound of boots smacking against the metal floor can be heard out in the hall, and Ohio turns her attention back to the radio.

“This is Agent Ohio of Project Freelancer, here with Agents Idaho and Iowa,” she says into the radio. “Um—who is this, what’s going on?”

“ _Th..k god,”_ the voice crackles. “ _This is Agen… ton with Project… lancer.”_

“Agent Washington?” Ohio gasps as Idaho and Iowa come up behind her. “ _David_?”

“What?” Idaho pushes his glass further up the bridge of his nose. “It’s Wash?”

“Sh-shhh!” Ohio hisses.

“ _… nning out of time,_ ” the voice—Wash?—continues. “ _What are your—_ ”

Iowa slams his hands over his ears and Idaho cries out as the radio fizzes and whines. Ohio scrambles to turn the volume down while it calms down, nearly tipping her chair over.

“Hello? Hello?” Ohio spins the dial to turn up the volume on the radio and releases the talk button.

“ _… lost you for… are your coordinates?”_

“Coordinates,” Ohio whispers. “Coordinates, uh.”

Whirling around in her chair, kicking Idaho in the shins in the process, Ohio leaps to her feet and starts digging through the dusty crates piled in the corner of the communications room.

“What’re you looking for?” Idaho asks, massaging his legs.

“A map,” Ohio says, moving from one box to the next.

“Why?” Iowa asks.

“For the coordinates,” Ohio snaps. “God, do either of you feel like helping, or?”

Idaho springs forward and starts going through boxes too, while Iowa moves towards the radio. After a few minutes, Ohio sinks back and sighs, inspecting her hands, grimy with dust. She’s about to go radio Wash that she has absolutely _no fucking idea_ where they are, when she hears the click of the talk button.

Iowa.

“Uh, yeah, I think our coordinates are…”

Ohio listens, dumbfounded, as Iowa recites their coordinates over the radio. She’s only seventy-five percent sure Iowa’s right—it’s, well, Iowa. But she doesn’t really have any better ideas, especially because she’s pretty sure they used all the maps as kindling when they tried to set fire to Sherry’s base. It didn’t spread very far.

“ _… have your location, we’re sending a ship your way_ ,” the voice says. Yeah, that definitely sounds like Wash. Who else would it be? Are there any other states that end in ‘ton’? Ohio doesn’t have the patience to think much on it.

She’s too fricking excited.

“C’mon, we gotta go tell Sherry and the guys!” Ohio says, leaping away from the radio and taking off down the hall.

“Vera!” Idaho shouts down the hall at her. “Vera, don’t _forget your armor_!”

Ohio, fist ready to open the doors leading to a very cold, very awful death, pauses.

“Oh, yeah.”

 

Something is off. Sherry knows something is off, because Vera is just running straight at her base, no gun, no grenade, only armor. If she didn’t need it for the cold, Sherry’s willing to bet Vera wouldn’t have even bothered to put it on.

As Vera closes in, Sherry raises her rifle, ready to fire a few warning shots. She isn’t sure what convoluted scheme Vera’s come up with this time, but she’s not about to let her guard down. Finger mere millimeters over the trigger, Sherry waits for Vera to get a little closer, and, just as she’s about to shoot, she sees Mika and Ezra dart into view behind Vera, also unarmed.

Sherry lowers her gun, brows furrowed. Squinting against the light reflecting off the snow, she notices Mike’s got something long and white and billowing tied to his armor. At first, she thinks it’s a parachute, but as the three ex-Freelancers grind to a halt below her, arms outstretched and chattering away all at once, she realizes it’s a flag.

Are they fucking surrendering?

“We surrender!” Ezra shouts up at her.

Vera elbows him in the ribs, knocking him onto his butt. Sherry bites back a smile while Vera scrambles to pull Ezra to his feet. Vera always seems to forget that power armor is, well, _power_ armor.

“We are soooo not surrendering!” Vera yells. “We’re just taking a break, that’s all!”

“Uh-uh, don’t think so, honey,” Sherry retorts. “You think you can just take a vacation from war?”

“Shyeah, it’s called ‘leave’?” Vera fires back. “Besides, this isn’t some dumb vacation, we have a _mission_.”

“A mission?” Sherry starts to get suspicious once more that this is, in fact, a ploy by Vera to catch her, Terrill and Darryl off guard.

“Yeah!” Ezra shouts. “A super-secret rescue mission for Project Freelancer.”

“Project Freelancer?” Sherry crosses her arms. “Aren’t they the assholes that abandoned you here in the first place?”

“They said they were really sorry and that they forgot to pick us up and said they’ll come get us now,” Mike yells.

Something stinks, and whether it’s Vera or Project Freelancer, this whole scenario is bullshit.

“Give me a minute, I’m coming down!”

On her way to the front of the base, she grabs Terrill and Darryl, who are playing cards in the breakroom, wearing only the bottom halves of their armor. Normally she’d tease them about it, but she’s in a hurry.

Bursting out into the snow, Sherry looks around to see if Vera and the others waited for them. Her eyes catch glints of blue and the flap of their makeshift flag, and she heads in that direction.

Vera strides over, closing the distance between them. Sherry would bet everything she has that Vera’s grinning ear to ear right now, and her heart sinks.

“Look,” Sherry says, “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“What?” There’s genuine confusion in Vera’s voice. “Why?”

“I mean, after all this time, after _years_ , Project Freelancer just, just—” Sherry shakes her head. “Don’t you think it smells fishy, them coming out of the blue after leaving you here for dead?”

“I don’t smell any fish,” Mike chimes in.

“We—we never, like, got _proof_ they abandoned us here,” Vera says, wringing her hands. “I mean, what if the mission was to, uh, do recon for three years or, or however long we’ve been here.”

Ezra shuffles on his feet, staying silent, but Sherry can sense he’s just as unsure as she is. Turning to him, she asks,

“Do _you_ think this is a good idea?”

“Huh? Oh,” Ezra looks at Sherry, then at Vera, then over at Sherry again. “Well, it’s definitely weird, but what other chance of getting off this planet do we have?”

And that’s that— Ezra isn’t going to be any help. No matter how ominous this feels, he’ll choose to follow Sherry.

“Vera, please,” Sherry says, facing Vera once more. “Don’t go, this has trap written all over it.”

“You just don’t want us to leave so you won’t be alone again,” Vera snaps. Then her voice changes, and she says, “Come with us, then! Please, Sherry?”

Sherry bites the inside of her cheek. Her thoughts and her heart both feel like they’re running a marathon.

Vera’s right—Sherry doesn’t want to be alone, doesn’t want what they’ve had these past few years to end. But Vera is also wrong—Sherry doesn’t want Vera to go because she doesn’t want Vera to get hurt. She wants to get off this fucking icicle too, but she has her life to consider, _and_ Terrill and Darryl, because, like Ezra and Mike will go anywhere with Vera, Terrill and Darryl will go anywhere with her.

And as much as she loves Vera, she can’t justify walking into certain death.

“I’m sorry,” Sherry says, “This is a bad idea, Vera.”

“Fine,” Vera says tightly. Voice cracking, she adds, “Stay here and freeze to death, you coward.”

Turning on her heel, she gestures to Mike and Ezra, who follow her back to their base. Sherry opens her mouth to call out after her, but the words freeze in her throat.

She blames it on the cold.

 

Sherry’s late.

Ohio, sitting cross-legged in the empty tank they set for their meeting place, feels each minute drag by, punctuated by Sherry’s absence. She stares at the flashlight she duct-taped to the wall, it’s fading bluish-white light creating ghostly silhouettes out of the dead machinery. Shivering, she considers turning it off.

She used to think it looked cool, like in the movies where they’d go camping and hold the light to their faces and tell spooky stories. But those flashlights were always orange, warm. This light is blue and cold, like the world they try to escape when she and Sherry meet here.

Used to meet here.

Ohio feels her eyes start to burn with tears, but she blinks them away, furious. This isn’t her fault, it’s not. Sherry’s the one who’s too scared to leave, god knows why—doesn’t she want to get off this planet too?

Ohio rises, still in a crouched position so she doesn’t bang her head on the ceiling, ready to leave. Fuck Sherry, then. Maybe it’s good she’s not coming, if she can’t even show her fa—

There’s the screech of metal grinding against metal as the top of the tank is pulled open. Ohio can hear the wind whistling above, cut off as Sherry drops into the tank, yanking the top closed as she falls.

“Sorry, I,” Sherry starts, but stops talking suddenly, as if she had an excuse but decided it wasn’t worth the effort to explain herself.

Ohio shrugs, and sits back down, scooting back to make room for Sherry.

“So,” Ohio says once they’ve settled themselves. “Did you change your mind?”

“No, Vera,” Sherry sighs. “I think you should change _your_ mind.”

“Seriously?” Ohio grits her teeth. “For freaking real? You’re telling me, after all this time, after thinking we’re all alone and no one gives a shit about us, that—that now, when we have a chance to escape, you _don’t want to go_?”

Chest heaving, she waits for Sherry to respond. Sherry looks away and takes a deep breath.

“Vera, it’s _because_ we were abandoned without a hope of rescue that I think this feels wrong,” Sherry says. “Why would Freelancer leave you here on the pretense of a false mission, leave you here to die, and then suddenly change their minds?”

“Maybe because the mission was real after all,” Ohio snaps. Doubt creeps in, of course, curdling in her stomach and tickling the back of her brain. But she shoves it away, can’t even consider the alternative. “Even if it is a trick, at least we’ll be off this planet.”

“But if we get fucking killed, will it even matter?” Sherry asks.

“We’re gonna die here anyway!” Ohio yells, her voice echoing off the metal walls.

“Probably,” Sherry says, “But I can’t justify putting Terrill and Darryl in danger for a _maybe_. And I’d rather die on my own terms than stabbed in the back.”

“You know what I think?” Face on fire, Ohio pushes herself to her knees so she’s taller than Sherry. “I think you’re bitter because your people left you here to die, and mine actually came back for me.”

Sherry doesn’t say anything for a few moments. Ohio is grateful for their helmets. She’s not sure she could handle whatever emotion Sherry’s visor is hiding.

Finally, Sherry sighs, looking down at her hands.

“That’s not it, Vera,” she says.

“Then what is it, Sherry?” Ohio snaps.

“I just—we’ve got something here. And,” Sherry pauses, taking a shaky breath, “And I don’t want to lose this. Lose you.”

“Then come with me.” _Oh god, please don’t cry please don’t cry please don’t—_

“I can’t,” Sherry whispers.

Ohio feels her heart shatter into millions of tiny pieces and a feeling of loss stronger than she’s ever felt sweeps through her. But of the plethora of emotions fighting for control in her head, anger wins in seconds.

Punching the wall of the tank, Ohio rips the flashlight away, crushing it in her hand. As the inside of the tank is flooded in darkness, she feels her way towards the exit, reaches up and, finding the latch, gives it a twist. She shoves the lid open and flips on her helmet light.

Sherry’s still sitting where Ohio left her, speechless, frozen.

_Stop stop stop stop—_ Ohio’s brain is screaming at her, but she shakes her head, whisking the thoughts away.

Clambering up and out of the tank, Ohio casts Sherry a final glance.

“You’ve just lost me,” she spits, and she slams the lid of the tank shut.

 

Two days later, when the ship arrives, Sherry watches the Triplets rush up to meet it. She bites her lower lip, tries to blink away the ache in her eyes. They’ve been so swollen these past couple days—but not from crying or lack of sleep, that’s stupid, it’s obviously allergies.

Vera climbs into the ship without so much as a glance in her direction.

For hours after the ship takes off, Sherry gazes at the sky, as if any second now the ship will return, Vera having changed her mind and coming back to Sherry. But the ship doesn’t appear, and Sherry fights back tears as she looks away from the stars.

Lowering herself to the ground, Sherry leans back against the wall of the base, thinking maybe tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow, Vera will be back.

Closing her eyes, Sherry hopes for tomorrow.

_I’ll wait_. She thinks, as the snow starts to fall, covering her in a thin layer of the freezing crystals.

_I’ll wait._

 

Sherry waits.

And she waits.

She wakes up every morning and she waits.

Sherry stands by the window with her mug of instant fake coffee and she waits.

She runs Terrill and Darryl through drills until they’re unable to stand and she waits.

Sherry shoves her half eaten MRE away at dinner because it’s starting to taste like dust and she waits.

And she

 

She should have gone with her.

 

Sherry knows it’s a dream because she can’t read Vera’s face. It’s cold and flat as a stone, no emotions are etched there. Vera’s eyes stare straight through her, blank, colorless, as if the light can’t reach them. Her gray hair is pulled back into a tight knot. Vera never wears her hair that way. No—Vera’s hair isn’t gray.

Is it?

Sherry reaches out, brushes her fingers down Vera’s face, whispers something but she isn’t sure what because it comes out sounding like windchimes.

Vera doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t blink, doesn’t twitch. Sherry realizes she can’t feel the warmth of Vera’s breath on her hand and she stumbles back, hands raised, mouth open in a scream. But all that comes out is wind.

She watches as Vera finally moves, eyes shifting in Sherry’s direction. She lifts a bony hand and points at Sherry.

Then she crumbles into dust, thick and black.

Sherry awakens, comes up for air, legs tangled in her sheets and covered in cold sweat.

This time, her screams are real.

 

Four weeks pass. Then five. Still no sign of Vera and the others.

Standing guard outside up on the second floor of her base, Sherry kicks a small chunk of ice off the wall, watching it fall as it becomes a part of the blinding white blanket below. Sherry lets out a howl of frustration and hurls her rifle off the edge too, and it disappears in a cloud of swirling snow.

Why is she even fucking standing guard? It’s not like anyone’s here to attack them.

Maybe there would be if she’d tried harder to keep Vera here.

“Which is it?” Sherry shouts out loud, tilting her head back to glare at the sky. Like it’s going to have the answers she needs.

But the sky doesn’t have a face to read, so she finds nothing there, just a blank slate of gray clouds.

Which is it, should she have gone with Vera or tried harder to convince her to stay?

_Could’ve_ made _her stay_.

No. No, that’s not right either. Besides, the idea that Sherry could make Vera do _anything_ is so ridiculous, Sherry laughs out loud. Her brain goes to the strangest places sometimes. Well, it goes to strange places when the woman she loves leaves to chase a scratchy, sketchy distress call from “Project Freelancer”.

Lowering herself to a seated position at the edge of the second-floor wall, Sherry looks out at the wasteland before her. She hopes Vera is at least someplace warm.

If she’s alive.

Groaning, Sherry buries her head in her hands, the faint _tap tap tap_ of her tears hitting her visor seems deafening in the confines of the helmet. She’s so out of it, she doesn’t hear Terrill shouting at her over the radio until the feedback whines in her ear as he comes right up behind her.

“Agh!” She cries, almost wrenching her helmet off before she remembers that’s the worst idea ever. “What the _fuck_ , Terrill?”

“Sherry,” Terrill says, ignoring her question. “There’s a _ship_ , look!”

He points up, and sure enough, what looks to be an old UNSC ship is puttering towards them. Sherry watches as something _pops_ and a black plume of smoke bursts from one end of the ship. The thing’s definitely seen better days, so either the UNSC has really let themselves go, or the pilot of that ship is not its original owner.

Sherry doesn’t dare even hope.

“Come on,” she says, rising to her feet. “Let’s say hi.”

 

“Murder _what_?”

“Fridge,” the blue sim trooper standing in front of her repeats. “Murder fridge.”

“And what relevance does this _murder fridge_ have for me and my men, exactly?” Sherry demands.

“When we thawed out Agent Ontario, she told us we had to come pick you up since you ran out of gas,” the blue soldier answers.

“Agent On—” Sherry heaves a sigh, reaching up to massage her temples. “Look, can someone _else_ tell me what the fuck is going on? I’m running out of patience.”

Darryl hums and nods in agreement, and Terrill says, “Yeah, and you won’t like her when she runs out of patience. Because, it’s, uh, it’ll be not so great for you.”

“Shut _up_ ,” Sherry hisses. Turning towards the crowd of soldiers huddled in front of her, she juts her chin out, impatient. “Well?”

“What Caboose is trying to say,” one of the other soldiers—the teal one—says, “Is we found your girlfriend and her weird friends.”

 

Sherry was afraid she wouldn’t recognize her.

But now, standing in the doorway of the bleach-white recovery room, she realizes how ridiculous that sounds.

Because there, lying in the hospital bed, with that shit-eating grin on her face, is Vera.

Sherry’s heart climbs into her throat as her eyes drift down from Vera’s tangle of brown hair, to her eyes, tired but still fiery and golden. To her grin. To her shoulders, bony after days spent in deprivation, to her hands with the maroon nails. Sherry remembers painting those, weeks ago, wonders how they’ve only now started to chip away.

“I took the bottle when you weren’t looking,” Vera says.

Sherry starts and looks up from Vera’s nails to her eyes. Vera’s been staring at her the whole time, smile fading, and there’s a dark look in her eyes. Heart sinking, Sherry looks at her feet.

Is this where Vera yells at her? Tells her she should have come with her, should have tried harder to make her stay on that frozen wasteland? Or should Sherry yell at her, tell her _I told you so_?

“Are you mad at me?” Vera breaks the silence.

“What?” Sherry blinks, rushes over to the edge of Vera’s bed and plops down into a chair. Taking Vera’s hand in hers, Sherry exclaims, “No! No no no, why would I be mad, that’s ridiculous, I couldn’t, I’m just glad you’re not dead!”

Vera tilts her head back and laughs. Sherry closes her eyes and drinks it in.

God.

She fucking missed that sound.

“And I thought _I_ was the one that talked too much,” Vera teases.

“Hey!” Sherry tries to look offended but can’t hold back her smile. “Here I was, all happy to see you, but now I’m starting to have second thoughts.”

“So ungrateful,” Vera huffs. “I should’ve just left you on Planet Snowball.”

“Maybe so,” Sherry says, “But you didn’t, so I suppose I should thank you.”

“You’re—” Vera starts to say.

But she’s cut off as Sherry leans down and kisses her on the cheek, pulling away, waiting. Her scalp tingles as Vera returns the kiss, reaching up to weave her fingers through Sherry’s hair. It’s like she’s been struck by lightning, electricity shooting up from her toes to her brain. It’s like fireworks.

When they finally break apart, Vera giggles, cheeks pink.

“—Welcome,” she says, smiling.

Sherry wraps her arms around her, gently, weary of the heart monitor beeping off to her left. Vera returns the embrace, burying her face in the crook of Sherry’s neck.

“I love you,” Sherry says into Vera’s ear.

The heart monitor loses its shit as Sherry moves away from Vera, sitting back in her chair. Vera, on the other hand, is still frozen in place, eyes wide, face red. After a few moments she drops her arms and glares over at the heart monitor, a look of betrayal in her eyes, before turning her attention to Sherry.

“Are you trying to give me a heart attack?” she asks, crossing her arms in an attempt to compose herself.

“It’s possible,” Sherry says with a shrug. “But it’s true.”

“I mean, I love you too, but that’s no excuse to go giving people heart attacks!” Vera waves her arms around, and the heart monitor protests. Wincing, she lowers her arms to her sides.

“You versus me, sweet cheeks,” Sherry says. “You haven’t actually surrendered yet, remember? You’re just on ‘mission vacation’.”

Narrowing her eyes, Vera looks Sherry, who’s inspecting her nails now, up and down. A grin starts to tug at the edges of Vera’s mouth, and she says,

“Oh, it is so on.”

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! This was prompted by Hinn_Raven (@secretlystephaniebrown on Tumblr, RvB Angst War mod!): "Agent Ohio leaves to answer a Freelancer distress call. Sherry tries to stop her. When Vera doesn't come back, Sherry thinks it's her fault."
> 
> Thank you so much for the prompt!


End file.
